'Net Features : DudaMobile

Go Daddy Goes Mobile

Allison Howen — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 16:00:00 GMT

According to a recent Google study, nearly half of consumers (48%) feel like companies without mobile-optimized websites don’t care about their business.

Luckily, there are many options for businesses that haven’t taken the mobile plunge yet, including a new feature from Go Daddy. The popular hosting provider partnered with Dudamobile to bring mobile website building functionality to Go Daddy’s Website Builder service.

It is important to note that with this new feature, users don’t need to take any additional steps to activate their mobile site. In fact, once they publish their website with the Page Designer, the service automatically converts the standard website’s content to a mobile-optimized version. Moreover, Go Daddy clients leveraging a Deluxe or Premium plan can customize their websites even further in order to provide better usability to their mobile users.

Managed Mobile Ad Campaigns from DudaMobile

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 14:50:00 GMT

There is more to the mobile trend than design alone and the resulting "experience" so often discussed. You'll still need users (consumers of your mobile site or app) to find you.

DIY mobile web solution DudaMobile apparently got the message, as last week it introduced a managed mobile search advertising solution. With nearly 60 percent of smartphone users seeking out local businesses or services each week and 70 percent taking action that same day, it’s hard to deny there’s a rather substantial opportunity at play.

DudaMobile’s solution essentially provides its clients an opportunity to advertise on local/mobile search results with keywords that target customers on search engines such as Google or Bing when they look for products or services near them. What is unique however is that these campaigns are actually managed by a DudaMobile advertising "expert" which oversees all aspects of the business’s mobile ad campaign - from set-up to keyword selection to ongoing optimization. Pricing for DudaMobile’s managed mobile ad service starts at $199 per month.

“We always hear two things from our customers. They love that our mobile site builder is easy to use, and they want to know how they can get more business with their mobile website,” Itai Sadan, co-founder and CEO of DudaMobile said. “Now we have a solution for the small, local businesses that want to take advantage of mobile traffic and drive more sales.”

OpenTable Serves Up Free Mobile Sites

Allison Howen — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 17:00:00 GMT

A recent comScore study revealed that mobile phones and tablets now account for 1 in 8 U.S. Internet page views, further indicating that mobile is becoming an increasingly popular way for consumers to connect with businesses when they are away from their desktops.

This is especially true for consumers who are trying to find local businesses, such as places to eat, while on the go. Popular online reservation platform OpenTable has taken note of this trend, and is now offering a new service that optimizes its clients websites for mobile devices – for free.

The new service, powered by DudaMobile, is said to be easy to implement, while making a client’s website more user-friendly - without sacrificing the branding of the restaurant’s desktop website.

"More than ever diners are seeking information about restaurants and booking reservations on the go, yet the vast majority of restaurant websites are not designed for mobile use," said Matt Roberts, Chief Executive Officer of OpenTable. "Our goal is to make it easier for restaurants to reap the benefits from the shift toward mobile by removing the friction associated with creating and hosting mobile-friendly sites."

To further prove that mobile has made a huge impact in the restaurant industry, OpenTable claims that 28 percent of the 28 million diners that the company seated in North America booked their reservations on mobile devices in the second quarter of 2012. Additionally, OpenTable has seated more than 30 million diners through reservations booked on mobile devices since November 2008, which represents more than $1 billion in revenue for OpenTable’s restaurant clients.

OpenTable’s restaurant clients in the U.S., Canada and the UK can leverage this free service by claiming their mobile site through the OpenTable Restaurant Center before February 1, 2013.

Take Your WordPress Site Mobile

Michael Garrity — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 20:15:00 GMT

Much of the appeal of the WordPress platform is that it makes it easy to create an affordable, functional, and often feature-rich website without requiring extensive knowledge of the “nuts and bolts” of website development.

So when it suddenly became important to have a mobile-optimized website to stay competitive, many business owners or bloggers who aren’t necessarily experts in the field probably felt a pang of dread. However were they supposed to create another version of their sites that could work on an array of mobile devices?

Over time, a natural demand for easy-to-use mobile Web design solutions led to the creation of platforms like DudaMobile, which helps webmasters quickly and efficiently build a customized version of their websites that is optimized for most mobile devices. When DudaMobile noticed that a significant percentage of its customers were working with WordPress-powered websites, it seemed like a natural decision to streamline the optimization process by creating the DudaMobile WordPress plugin.

Released just last month, the new DudaMobile plugin saves WordPress users a significant amount of time and effort. It also makes it easy to optimize WordPress blogs with unique mobile-friendly templates, in addition to a number of useful add-ons and features for business websites that help them leverage the power of the mobile Web sooner, rather than later.

The plugin is easy to install and activate, and after that, it’s just one click to get started. DudaMobile will automatically render an “initial version” of a user’s mobile site and provides previews of what it will look like on the four major mobile operating systems (Android, iOS, Blackberry, and Windows Phones). These previews can always be accessed during the optimization process to allow users to examine their changes as they make them.

Once the initial version is rendered, users can customize their mobile site in just four steps. The first is to choose a theme. When the site is first created, it uses the original template employed by the site, but for the mobile version, users are able to select a brand new website or blog theme.

The second step is the most involved and deals with the majority of the editing and customization. Users are able to totally customize the site’s header and logo, navigation menu, background and text, and footer, as well as add a home icon or remove content. (The options are slightly different for blogs, allowing for customization of the header and logo, home page, blog posts, comments, and the footer.) Perhaps the most important aspect, however, is the ability to add widgets, which greatly increase the functionality of the mobile sites.

This additional content is split into three categories for Business, Design, and Social features, including the ability to insert images or a photo gallery, a mobile map, a restaurant menu, PayPal functionality, a click-to-call option, and much more. However, it is important to note that many of these features are only available with a premium mobile site (more on that in a second).

After the site is customized, the third step is to take it live. Here, users can choose between the free basic plan and the premium plan, which costs nine dollars a month. The premium plan provides a wider range of features than the basic option, including Google AdSense integration that lets users to monetize their mobile sites. Premium sites also get a unique “m.” mobile URL, while the basic users receive a standard DudaMobile mobile URL.

When the mobile site is live, all that is left to do is redirect the URL so that the mobile optimized site is loaded in mobile browsers. This is literally as simple as clicking “YES” to confirm the mobile site URL at the end of the process.

As you can see, with the new DudaMobile plugin, it’s cheap and easy to take your WordPress website or blog mobile. In just a few quick steps, you can begin leveraging the power of the mobile Web, and you can always go back and edit, customize, or add features to your mobile site as needed, which is especially helpful since DudaMobile will be adding new capabilities to the plugin every three weeks.

DudaMobile Turns Websites Mobile in One Click

Michael Garrity — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:15:00 GMT

A new service has just been rolled out by DudaMobile that consists of a self-serve platform providing existing website owners with the ability to create a mobile version of their site simply by typing in its URL.

This platform is mostly targeted towards small business owners who lack the Web development skills, or funds, that would allow them to create a mobile-friendly version of their current site. Of course, the service is free and open to anyone.

The two biggest and most convenient features that DudaMobile provides are one-click website conversion and automatic syncing between the main and mobile sites. Some of the other exciting highlights include mobile-friendly features like a click-to-call widget, a maps and directions widget, an SMS widget for texting business information, mobile analytics and, in time, Google AdWords support.

While there are already many free mobile website builders available, DudaMobile sets itself apart from the pack by offering automatic syncing between content from a desktop website to the mobile version in real-time as the changes are made. This is especially advantageous for those website owners with no background in mobile Web development, as they can simply make changes to their regular site as they normally would without having to worry about making sure it gets done on the mobile site, as well.

DudaMobile is currently hosting over 175,000 sites on this platform, with about 35 percent of them being small businesses, and some estimates say that users are creating 25,000 new mobile sites a day. However, many of these sites were forged prior to this new self-service platform.

The mobile sites that come from this new service work on all smartphones (including iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows phones), supports WordPress sites and offers dozens of design templates. Those who are more familiar with CSS and HTML will even have the option to further customize their sites.

According to DudaMobile, users are seeing up to 40 percent conversion rates on the mobile sites' click-to-call widgets. In fact, in some special categories like taxis or restaurants, the number gets as high as 50 percent.

The free service offers 10 pages, five hundred MB of bandwidth and is ad-supported. Professional sites are $9 a month, offer unlimited pages and bandwidth, a mobile URL, and are ad-free. Unfortunately, only the professional sites allow for use of the aforementioned widgets, but both the free and paid services offer analytics.